Mosques

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Bomb blasts tore through two village mosques in northwest Pakistan on Friday, killing at least 10 people and injuring more than 25, local authorities said. The bombings occurred in the village of Baz Darrah in the Malakand region, a rugged, mountainous area just west of Pakistan's Swat Valley. The bombs were detonated just as locals had arrived at the mosques for Friday afternoon prayers, said Malakand Deputy Commissioner Amjad Ali. Investigators were still trying to determine how the bombs were detonated, Ali said.

Seeking a way to prevent violence like last year's deadly Boston Marathon bombing, an Islamic advocacy group Monday announced a plan aimed at helping U.S. mosques identify and reeducate radicals. The Muslim Public Affairs Council - which long has pushed for a moderate, American-based Islam - hopes its "Safe Spaces Initiative" will get mosques to stop a pattern of dealing with extremists by simply shunning them and kicking them out. The plan was unveiled a day before Tuesday's one-year anniversary of the marathon bombing, allegedly orchestrated by ethnically Chechen Muslim brothers who lived in the Boston area.

Churches in the Holy Land will close for two days this month to protest plans to build a mosque in Nazareth, the town of Jesus' boyhood, Christian leaders said Thursday. Leaders of the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian denominations said in a statement that the decision to close the churches Nov. 22-23 is intended to express the "disapprobation of all the churches at the way that their rights have been summarily violated."

Robert James Talbot Jr. considered himself a revolutionary seeking to create a different society by robbing an armored car, killing police and even blazing a bloody path though a service at a mosque where he would shoot men, women and children at prayer, officials said. Talbot was ordered held without bond Wednesday at a hearing in Houston, Angela Dodge, a spokeswoman for Kenneth Magidson, the U.S. attorney for the southern district of Texas, said in an email. Talbot, 38, of Katy, Texas, was arrested last week , but government terror experts gave new details at Tuesday's hearing on what they said were his plans.

The Red Mosque reopened in Islamabad, Pakistan, with a defiant call for Islamic law from its incarcerated prayer leader, nearly three months after an army raid there left more than 100 people dead. Commandos attacked in July after an anti-vice campaign led from the mosque boiled over into gun battles with police. A first attempt to reopen the mosque in July ended when students seized the building and a suicide bomber killed 13 people nearby.

Thailand's prime minister promised to restore a historic mosque that was shot up as security forces stormed it last month and killed 32 suspected Islamic insurgents hiding inside. About 1,000 villagers came to see Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra as he visited the 16th century Krue Se mosque, which was damaged April 28 by Thai soldiers who fired automatic weapons, tear gas and grenades at it. Thaksin said he would order the government's Fine Arts Department to repair walls that were damaged.

The Islamic Center of Northridge will break ground Sunday in Granada Hills for what will be the first mosque built in the San Fernando Valley. The Muslim worship center, approved by the Los Angeles City Council in September, 1990, after imposing a record number of restrictions, received the construction permit from the city last week, said Ahmed El-Gabalawy, public affairs director for the center.

Two 16th-Century mosques were blown up in the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Banja Luka on Friday in an attack condemned by the United Nations as an attempt by extremists to terrorize Muslims into flight. Sources in the northern Bosnian town, who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisals, said police sealed the area around the Ferhad-Pasha and Arnaudija mosques following two powerful blasts.

Bijeljina's residents thought the early morning explosions last week were an artillery attack. They awoke to find that the town's mosques--the last in eastern Bosnia--had been razed. About 9,000, or half, of the town's Muslims have left since the war began. Those remaining may see the mysterious destruction of the mosques as a pointed warning that they, too, should flee Bijeljina, a Serbian stronghold only five miles from the border with Serbia.

Re "Muslims say FBI spying is causing anxiety," March 1 If the teaching in mosques is about love, compassion and doing good deeds, why are Muslims fearful? Discussions about jihad, killings and destruction of lives and property should be reported to authorities. Muslims who are pure of heart -- honest, law-abiding citizens -- have nothing to fear. Herbert J. Young Beverly Hills -- Unfortunately, it's much more difficult to catch real terrorists than it is to catch mosque-goers.

HEBRON, West Bank - Nidal lives just steps from the mosque where his life changed forever. It was there, during early morning prayers in 1994, that an Israeli physician named Baruch Goldstein walked in and opened fire, killing 29 Palestinians and wounding 125. Nidal, then 25 and engaged to be married, was shot twice in one arm and once in the back. The massacre at the Ibrahim mosque at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a holy site for Muslims, Jews and Christians in the West Bank city of Hebron, occurred 20 years ago this week.

Police officials in Manteca, Calif., said Tuesday that they had launched a hate-crime investigation after vandals defaced a mosque with vulgar graffiti and left strips of raw bacon strewn on the ground. Manteca police Sgt. Jodie Estarziau said officers responded to the Islamic Center of Manteca on Jan. 28 after receiving reports of "spray-painted vulgarities" and pieces of raw bacon that were found in a parking lot just inside the front gate of the property. Muslims do not eat pork products and bigots often use pigs or pork to offend Muslims, said officials with the Sacramento Valley chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- A bomb ripped through a crowded mosque where evening prayers were being held Thursday, killing six people and wounding 60 others, officials said. The dead included two children. The explosion occurred in the main prayer hall of a sprawling Islamic seminary near a military cantonment on the outskirts of Peshawar, a provincial capital in northwest Pakistan, said police official Najeebur Rehman. Two people were killed instantly while four others died of their injuries at a hospital, Rehman said.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Five security personnel were killed and 34 wounded Wednesday evening when a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden mini-truck into a mosque near a checkpoint in Pakistan's North Waziristan Agency, officials said. Army and Frontier Corps troops were praying at the roadside mosque when the explosion took place, said an official who asked not to be identified for security reasons. Five bodies were retrieved from the debris and 34 wounded soldiers were rescued.

Tucked into the deeply evangelical corner of southwestern Missouri, the Islamic Society of Joplin's mosque was an oasis for Muslims -- the only mosque within a 50-mile radius. But in August 2012, during Ramadan, the building burned to the ground in an apparent arson fire. It was the second attempt made on the mosque in about a month; activists feared a hate crime, and a team of federal and local investigators couldn't find a suspect. But now, a surprise turn in a different arson case has implicated an Iraq veteran, who officials say confessed over the weekend to burning down the mosque in addition to making attempts on the local Planned Parenthood office.

Rihanna didn't get the letter of the law, much less the spirit of it, as she wore tight clothing and bright-red lipstick and sexy-posed for pics at the most famous mosque in Abu Dhabi over the weekend. She was, um, asked to leave. RiRi didn't even make it inside, actually, according to a news release issued by the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Centre (translated via 7 Days in Dubai ) on Monday. "The Centre would like to point to a personal visit incident that was carried out by 'a prominent singer' to the mosque.

Morocco's King Mohammed VI ordered the construction of 20 mosques in poor areas of large cities in a move to counter radical Islamic preaching at illegal mosques. Twelve Islamic suicide bombers who killed 33 people in Casablanca last year came from shantytowns where, a government investigation charged, they had been brainwashed by radical clerics in makeshift mosques. Hundreds of similar mosques have proliferated in cities across the North African country over the last 20 years.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A bomb placed in a mosque detonated during morning prayers Tuesday, killing the governor of eastern Logar province, Afghan officials said. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the assassination of the governor, Arsallah Jamal, but suspicion fell on the Taliban. The group has been targeting Afghan officials, police, military personnel and NATO troops in the run-up to late 2014, when foreign combat troops are scheduled to leave the country. The bombing took place at around 9 a.m. as the governor gave a speech to hundreds of people attending prayers for Eid al-Adha -- one of the year's most important Islamic holidays, marking the end of the Hajj pilgrimage -- said Hasibullah Stanikzai, Jamal's secretary.

BEIRUT -- More than 40 people were killed Friday when a car bomb exploded outside a Sunni Muslim mosque in a Syrian town near the Lebanese border, opposition activists said. The bomb went off in the town of Rankous, north of the capital Damascus, just as worshipers were leaving the mosque after Friday prayers, according to anti-government activists. Internet footage from the immediate aftermath showed charred bodies amid burning vehicles and a damaged mosque. Funeral processions and burials held soon after the bombing were shelled from nearby Syrian government bases, said Omar Abdulrahman, an activist with the Revolution Leadership Council, an opposition and humanitarian group based in Damascus and its suburbs.